Sponsored by CMC’s public art committee and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, "Activating the Campus" will examine the relationship between art, architecture, and the campus. Internationally recognized artists, curators, and scholars will join curator and Gould Center Distinguished Visiting Fellow Philipp Kaiser and Professor Robert Faggen, director of the Gould Center and Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature, to discuss these themes and formally launch Claremont McKenna’s public art initiative.
Held tomorrow night in the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, the event begins with a 5 p.m. reception followed by dinner at 5:30 p.m. The panel discussion will begin at 6:15 p.m. (to reserve a place at dinner, click here to visit the Athenaeum reservation site).
In addition to Kaiser and Faggen, the panelists in Wednesday night's panel are:
Miwon Kwon is trained in architecture, holds a MA in photography, and has extensive curatorial experience from her tenure at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 1990s. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University in 1998, the same year in which she joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, to teach contemporary art history (post-1945). Her research and writings have engaged several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, public art, and urban studies. She was a founding co-editor and publisher of Documents(1992-2004), and serves on the advisory board of the journal October. She is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002), as well as lengthy essays on the work of many contemporary artists. Kwon recently co-organized the major historical exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 with Philipp Kaiser at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Currently, she is the Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA.
Jorge Pardo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1963 and studied at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Pardo is well known for his architectural spaces and design inflected works including a bookstore for the Dia Art Foundation, a restaurant for the K21 Museum, a house built as an artwork and a home for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the re- design of the installation for the pre-Columbian collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include mid-career surveys at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; K21, Dusseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. His work is part of numerous public collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Modern, London. Formerly based in Los Angeles, Pardo currently lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.
Oscar Tuazon was born in 1975 in Seattle and studied at the Deep Springs College, Cooper Union, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. He previously worked for Acconci Studio executing major public projects around the globe. Inspired by what the artist calls “outlaw architecture,” Tuazon’s practice blurs the lines between art and architecture and form and function. Recent exhibitions include “Oscar Tuazon: Alone In An Empty Room” at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne and “White Walls, Sensory Spaces” at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. He has also executed major works for the 2012 Whitney Biennial and ILLUMInations, the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011. His work is a part of major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunsthaus Zurich, and the Saatchi Gallery Collection, London.
Rochelle Steiner is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer and professor of critical studies at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California, where she served as dean from 2010-12. She was previously Director of the Public Art Fund, New York (2006-9), Chief Curator of the Serpentine Gallery, London (2001-6), and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum (1996-2001). Steiner has curated major exhibitions and large-scale public art projects in the US, Europe and Asia, including 6 Under 60, an exhibition about emerging international cities for the 2011 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Olafur Eliasson’s The New York City Waterfalls (2008), and monographic exhibitions with John Currin, Ellsworth Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Peyton, Cindy Sherman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among many others. Steiner received an MA and PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, New York.